What eight months of price readings show

On 19 August, Mochi Health cut the medication half of its compounded offering. Semaglutide went from $99 to $60 a month, tirzepatide from $199 to $90. Mochi requires a $79 monthly membership and states plainly that medication is not included in it, so the all-in monthly figure moved from $178 to $139 for semaglutide and from $278 to $169 for tirzepatide - a 22% and a 39% cut.

That put Mochi's tirzepatide below Maximus at $198 for a 28-day supply in our table. The same page picked up a qualifier it had not carried before: "Price varies based on the dose your provider prescribes." So the $60 and $90 are the bottom rungs of a dose-based ladder, not a flat rate. We caught the change on a scheduled re-read; it was not announced.

One series in our data does not change price - it stops. Hims sold compounded semaglutide at $199 all-in through 13 February, and from 30 March the same page sells a branded Wegovy pen at $348. Between those dates the compounded line simply ends.

That is a $149 jump for the same molecule, and it is the clearest illustration in the dataset of what happens when a compounded route closes: the price a buyer sees is not adjusted, it is replaced by a different product. Anyone quoting a 2026 compounded-semaglutide price from memory is quoting a market that no longer exists at that seller.

The other three movements deserve to be labelled honestly, because each one looks like a price change and is not.

TrimRx, 19 August: $179 to $299. TrimRx did not raise its price by 67%. Its homepage card advertises $179, its terms page prices the follow-up consultation - the ongoing month - at $299, and the $179 is a first-month rate. We had been recording the advertised figure. The tirzepatide row moved $259 to $399 for the same reason.

Maximus, 4 August: $149.99 to $116. The earlier figure was read from a different Maximus page, and no archived copy of either page from that window exists, so the record cannot tell whether Maximus changed a price. From 4 August the figure is its weight-loss page, which prices a 28-day supply at $116. Twenty-eight days is not a calendar month: a year of it is thirteen payments, not twelve.

Ro, 4 August: $494 to $498. Ro charges $349 for a Wegovy pen plus a $149 membership on the one-month plan. The four-dollar move is our shift from an entry figure to the ongoing one. Nothing on Ro's side moved.

Every one of those corrections runs in the same direction: the number a seller puts in front of you is lower than the number you keep paying. First-month rates, 28-day cycles priced as months, memberships quoted separately from medication. None of it is hidden - all four figures above come from the sellers' own pages and terms - but all of it requires reading past the card.

This is why our ledger records an ongoing, all-in figure and excludes promotional first months. It is also why a price comparison assembled from homepages is close to meaningless: three of our four largest "movements" this year came from exactly that mistake, made by us, and corrected only because someone opened the terms page.

The branded anchors held flat for the entire period. NovoCare's Wegovy cash price stayed at $349 and LillyDirect's Zepbound at $299 from the day each entered our series. Hims branded stayed at $348 and $448, Ro at $349 and $299 before membership, Henry Meds at $179 from March to August without a single change.

So the volatility in this market is not where the headlines suggest. The manufacturers' direct-to-consumer prices are stable. The movement is in the compounded tier, and in August it moved down at one seller and stayed put at every other.

Each reading is taken from the seller's own page or terms and recorded with the date it was read and the sentence it was read from. Since 23 June there is one reading per seller per day, apart from gaps where our collection did not run (20-21 August and 23 August to 13 September). Before that, and wherever a seller blocks automated requests, we use the Internet Archive's capture of the same page, so the date is the capture date. Prices are normalised to an ongoing monthly, all-in figure: medication plus any mandatory membership, excluding promotional first months and discount codes.

The limits are worth stating. Fifteen series is not the market - it is nine sellers, two of them the manufacturers' own programmes, and two molecules. For the first half of the year it is only three of them. A "lowest rung" price on a dose-based ladder is not what a patient on a higher dose pays. And our own three corrections this year are evidence that a figure can sit in a dataset for months before someone notices it was the wrong figure.

This article is a reading of the record at one moment. The record itself is kept at the price history, which lists every change as it happens and publishes every underlying reading as a file anyone can open; what things cost right now is on the price tracker.